


A moving sea.

by orange_crushed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic Fluff, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Season/Series 09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-16
Updated: 2014-04-16
Packaged: 2018-01-19 15:05:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1474156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a pretty song but just too fucking sad, even if he doesn’t catch all the words, so Dean reaches out to change it. But Castiel’s hand meets his halfway, startles him into pulling back. He glances over and sees Castiel’s eyes watching him, glittering a little in the light from the dash. He wasn’t sleeping at all. “I like this one,” Castiel says. “Do you mind?”</p>
<p>"No," says Dean, and leaves it. Castiel twines their fingers together and they stay like that for the next dozen miles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A moving sea.

Dean finds him standing in front of the bathroom mirror, shirtless and stock-still and staring at his own reflection, a clouded blur where he’s wiped the steam away with his hands. He doesn’t seem to have heard Dean come down the hall. He doesn’t seem to notice Dean now, close behind the open bathroom door, caught by the bare skin of Castiel’s shoulders: suddenly breathing quietly through his nose and trying not to make a sound. And even though it’s maybe weird, it’s maybe rude, to stand there and watch somebody look at themselves in the mirror, even if they are your- whatever they are, Dean does it anyway. 

Castiel leans closer and then leans back. He puts his nose almost to the surface of the mirror and then he tugs at his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth, with the tips of his fingers; draws the skin tight and lets it slacken, opens his mouth in what ought to be a smile but isn’t, baring his teeth. He lifts up the fringe plastered down on his forehead, smooths it back against his scalp. Pushes his ears forward and lets them go. He stands there for a long minute and just stares silently, motionless, still. Waiting for something.

Nothing happens, except that Dean catches the edge of his toe on the door frame.

“ _Fu_ \- hey,” Dean says, less than gracefully. Castiel is already turning around, and for a second before he’s composed himself, there is something on his face that might be- well, Dean has no idea why he’d think this, what the hell would give him this idea. But for a second, Castiel looks ashamed. And then it’s gone, and his face is blankly relaxed, cheeks a little pink from his shower. “You okay?”

"I’m fine," Castiel says. "Did I take a long time?"

"Nah," Dean says. "I was just gonna put lunch together. Hungry?"

"Yes," says Castiel, smiling. Dean puts extra onions on his sandwich just for that, to cheer him up. 

The next day they’re in Wyoming, killing a fucking baby basilisk of all things, and it’s great that Dean remembers the mirror, because that’s how they manage to look around the corner in time to chop its fucking head off. He turns on his cell phone camera and holds it up around the end of the sewer drain tunnel and picks his moment to come hammering down with the machete, and boom. Time enough to catch the diner’s early bird special. Dean sits in the opposite side of the booth and watches Castiel pick at his french fries and roast beef sandwich _au jus_.

"Thanks for the good idea," Dean says, before his brain can flash the _don’t talk about this alarm_. It goes off a second too late, and Dean remembers with fresh and uncomfortable clarity that _creeping_ was the actual source of his good idea. Castiel looks up from the shambles of his mostly-uneaten meal and gives him a strange look. Dean flushes. 

"What idea?"

"The mirror thing," Dean says. "I saw you, uh, you were- you were looking at yourself yesterday, and today-"

"Oh," says Castiel.

"Worried about something?" Dean asks. "Got a zit?" He dug this hole, so he might as well go ahead and stand in it, see if it comes up to his shoulders. "Gonna dye your hair?"

"No," says Castiel. He pushes his plate away, just a few inches, so that it almost bumps Dean’s. "Excuse me." And then he slides out of the booth and stands up and goes to the restroom. He stays in there for ten whole minutes, until Dean finally just pays the check and goes to rap on the bathroom door with the backs of his knuckles, feeling like he’s really missed something. Starting to worry. 

"Cas?" he says, into the door. "Cas, open up. I was just being a dick." Castiel comes out and he looks fine, looks normal. Dean doesn’t know what he expected: tears or barf or blood or something, some kind of embarrassing food poisoning thing, an allergy attack? Does Castiel even have allergies? Could he get some? Dean doesn’t know. "What’s-"

"I’m ready to go now," Castiel says. "Sorry to make you wait."

In the car on the way home, driving across flat empty roads in the dark, Castiel curls up into a ball on the other side of the seat and tugs his coat across his shoulders and closes his eyes. He doesn’t say anything for an hour, and Dean thinks he’s asleep. A little while after they cross the state line the radio station fades out and goes static and then becomes something else, a Spanish-language station playing a slow, mellow song with a rattling guitar in the background, somebody singing either about a woman named Rosa or the flower itself, plaintively, worshipfully, straight from the mouth of a broken heart. It’s a pretty song but just too fucking sad, even if he doesn’t catch all the words, so Dean reaches out to change it. But Castiel’s hand meets his halfway, startles him into pulling back. He glances over and sees Castiel’s eyes watching him, glittering a little in the light from the dash. He wasn’t sleeping at all. “I like this one,” Castiel says. “Do you mind?”

"No," says Dean, and leaves it. Castiel twines their fingers together and they stay like that for the next dozen miles.

 

 

 

Castiel gets a library card- Dean thinks Sam drove him into town for that, because he didn’t ask Dean- and comes back with a bunch of CDs in plastic jewel cases. They sit next to the stereo in the library for a while and every now and then when they’re not working on something Dean will come across Castiel sitting on the couch, raptly attentive to something that Dean’s never heard of, some kind of percussion group, world music with a lot of wooden flutes. And then it’s jazz for a while- Monk and Coltrane, somebody called Art something, Billie Holiday. Then hip hop, Gregorian chants, bluegrass, a shit ton of classical piano that starts to all sound the same to Dean. It’s almost a relief when Castiel gets to opera and there are human voices again. He sits on the sofa and listens to _Tosca_ all the way through, then _The Magic Flute_. When Dean comes in during the final act Castiel pauses it and tells him the whole story and like, at least there are a bunch of animals and wizards and shit in it. When the CD is over Castiel goes to the stereo and takes the disc out, stares at it in his hand like he expects it to do something.

"Did you like that one?" Dean asks. Castiel looks up from what he’s holding, and makes a face like he doesn’t understand the question.

"I think so," he says. "I think it was beautiful." He moves on to pop music for a while after that: he tries Abba and doesn’t like it, and he turns off the Rolling Stones five songs into the anthology. But he listens to _Rubber Soul_ eight times in a row. Dean makes him switch to something else and then sits there and eats cold leftover pad thai with him, straight out of the containers. Dean watches him sort through the CDs he’s going to return, frowning stonily down at the ones he didn’t care for, frowning a little harder at the ones he did.

"What are you looking for?" Dean asks him at last, and Castiel doesn’t say anything at all.

 

 

 

"A museum?" Dean glances into the backseat, then back at Sam, sitting shotgun. "This podunk town’s actually got a museum?" He can see the edge of Castiel’s shoulder rise and sink in a shrug, just a sliver of his fake fed suit showing in the rear-view mirror. 

"It’s not important," says Castiel.

"No," Dean says. "No. We got this almost wrapped up. We kill this ghoul tonight, museum tomorrow."

"We’ll have to get a motel," Sam says. He doesn’t sound like he’s complaining. Of course he’s not complaining, Dean thinks to himself: Castiel’s kind of a nerd but Sam’s King Nerd of Tall Guy Mountain. Uncontested.

"It’s not necessary," Castiel says, reasonably. "It was just a suggestion."

"Who cares?" Dean says. "You want to see it, we’ll see it. I can’t remember the last time I went to a museum. Maybe that one in Denver, where that guy got hung in the basement?" Sam makes a thoughtful noise like he might be remembering. "Yeah. Art museum, big red squares and paintings of dead dudes. And a boiler room with a real pissed-off ghost." The song on the radio changes and Dean’s hands drum the steering wheel. "What do people wear to museums?"

The ghoul- ghouls plural, like fucking always- goes down hard and next morning Dean’s got a bruised head and a scrape across his face but he puts butterfly bandages on it and promises Sam and Castiel a dozen times that he’s fine, he wants to go see the place with them, no he doesn’t want to just go home. They finally give up and drive him to the museum and Dean trails after them while they take a tour of the historic house with a nice old lady in a buttoned cardigan. A couple of times he thinks he’s found a fancy chair he can sit in and take a break, but it turns out those are part of the exhibits, too. Sam goes outside to take a phone call- probably a follow up from the coroner about the bodies they strategically misplaced- and Castiel’s absorbed in a display about early nineteenth-century art collecting, and Dean is sitting there staring out the window into the kitchen garden, which according to the brochure is laid out the same way it was in eighteen twenty-five. That strikes him as pretty damn cool. He imagines himself in old-timey clothes with breeches and a waistcoat, staring out of this window and seeing this exact garden, those exact bean plants, those stalks of corn and carpets of delicate little herbs. Kinda nice, that garden. Kind of thing you’d feel good coming home to. He doesn’t realize he’s zoned out until Castiel nudges his shoulder, standing close beside him, looking a little concerned. Castiel tilts his head up and tries to check his pupils until Dean bats his hands away. 

"Have your painkillers worn off?"

"No," Dean says. "Maybe. I’m good." He looks back out the window and Castiel looks with him. "See that? Same garden they had like, two hundred years ago."

"There’s a drawing of the gardens in the next room you might like," Castiel says. "There was a second garden then. Medicinal plants. Lemon balm. Yarrow. Lamb’s ears."

"Lamb’s _ears_?”

"Fluffy leaves," Castiel says. Dean laughs and Castiel smiles, briefly bright, and then it slides away. "I’m ready to leave whenever you two are."

"Cool," Dean says. He glances out to the yard one more time and then turns back to Castiel. "You have fun?" Castiel shrugs, but he looks pretty relaxed. "I know this place isn’t anything special. Next time we hit a big city, we’ll stop for a day or whatever. Like Chicago. They’ve got museums."

"This was fine," says Castiel. "It- I think it had what I needed."

"What’s that?"

"I don’t know yet," he says.

"Um," says Dean. "Okay."

 

 

 

Castiel borrows paperbacks from Dean and treats them carefully, kindly: he forgets them everywhere around the bunker, leaving them balanced on top of shelves and on the back of armchairs, but he doesn’t dog-ear the pages or stain the pages with potato-chip grease. Dean’s already done that. Castiel reads them all, one by one. He works through Dean’s Vonnegut: _Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, Bluebeard, Player Piano_. He reads the Elmore Leonard paperbacks Dean bought in a series of Goodwills over the last six years, and lets Dean download and show him the movies afterwards. He requests a bunch of Spanish and Japanese novels from the librarian in Lebanon, but he reads _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ in English and Dean takes it out of the library after him, sits reading in bed at night and asking Castiel questions about it. And then Castiel reads _The Martian Chronicles_ and begins working his way through the library’s science-fiction shelf. From there he finds Butler and Le Guin, books with dragons on the cover that Dean borrows from him and reads in motel rooms and in the passenger seat of the car when Sam’s driving and Castiel’s curled up and snoring a little in the back, his thumb still stuck inside a paperback. It’s sort of funny when Dean thinks about it: hunters reading books about aliens and demons and magic and shit, like they don’t get enough at work. But Dean knows they’re really metaphors for things: for growing up, for being alone. For fear. That much makes perfect sense. When he found out what demons really were it was like a dream, a nightmare he’d had a billion times already before he turned twelve. He felt it before he knew. Demons were supposed to be monsters, crawling things from pure darkness, coming from hell, or no place in particular. But they weren’t. They didn’t come from nothing. They were Soylent Green. They were people. 

"You might like this one," Castiel says, and hands him _The Farthest Shore_.

"Hey," Dean says. He runs his thumb over the cover. "Boats."

He reads it and dreams about waves lapping the side of the car, rocking them slowly side to side. When he wakes up in the middle of the night to an empty bed and goes looking for a glass of water, he finds Castiel sitting cross-legged on the sofa under the light of a single lamp, finishing the last pages of something. 

“ _The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop_ ,” Castiel reads quietly, so quietly Dean’s not sure he isn’t just talking to himself, “ _although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea_.” He looks up at Dean and smiles, faintly, tiredly. There are circles under his eyes. “I couldn’t sleep.”

"I know the feeling."

Dean sits next to him and Castiel reaches up and shuts the lamp off, and then there’s nothing but the faint glow of the emergency lights in their tracks under the ceiling, running along the stairs in strips of red and gold. “Cas-“

"I thought I’d know," he says. Dean waits, and after a long second Castiel draws in a breath and says, "I thought I’d be able to feel it. I don’t know why. People don’t, but- I kept trying to find the thing that would- something that would let me know. It was foolish."

"Feel what?"

"My soul," says Castiel. "But I think-" he stops, and turns his face away. The next thing he says comes out in a whisper. "I don’t think I have one."

In the dark Dean can barely see him, just the outline of his face, his ear and his cheek, the plane of his jaw and the dip of his collarbone over his shirt. He’s wearing one of Dean’s raggedy old t-shirts, probably the one that says _No Fear_ that Dean bought at a mall in 1997, before Dean knew what the fuck an angel was and why they should scare the shit out of him. Castiel doesn’t know why that shirt’s so stupid, but Castiel doesn’t care, either. He never cares about those things, about wearing the wrong shirt. It’s sort of amazing. The rest of them are arrested development cases: their shit lives turned them into sullen, self-conscious teenagers forever, probably, but not Castiel. He’s not built like that. He likes things just because he likes them and dislikes things mainly if they’re mean-spirited. Just because he burns his toast most of the time doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s probably the only actual grown-up Dean knows. Dean can’t bear the thought that he is somehow suffering with this, with the frankly ridiculous thought that he is missing something: that there is anything good in the world, anything pure and right in people, that Castiel doesn’t have in him, too. Castiel is made out of those things.

"Yeah, you do," Dean says. Castiel looks at him for a second and it’s like Dean can feel him smiling, can feel the gentle way his mouth is curving up, the downward flicker of his eyes. 

"Thank you," he says, "but-" 

"I promise you," Dean says. He reaches out and in the dark his hand hits Castiel’s shoulder and then slides across to his chest, and even though this is awkward, this is part of something else so new it’s terrifying, Dean uncurls his fingers and puts his whole hand across Castiel’s heart, across the place where it’s thudding in his chest, so hard that Dean can feel it. "I promise. It’s there." Castiel doesn’t say anything at first, and then his hand comes up and rests over Dean’s, warm and solid. "If I have one, you have one," Dean says. 

"You have one," Castiel says, softly. "It’s very beautiful."

"Can you, uh-"

"Not anymore," says Castiel.

"Yeah," Dean says. "Yeah, I figured."

 

 

 

When he’s looking for spare towels one day- they all seem to congregate in their room, in a pile that hangs off the back of Castiel’s desk chair- Dean finds a spiral-bound notebook buried under a couple of volumes on warding taxonomies. He holds it in one hand and turns it over, finds little circular pen doodles on the back cover, like somebody was bored and their mind was wandering, the kind of stuff Dean used to draw in the margins of his notes at school. Dean stares at it for a long time. And then, even though he knows he shouldn’t, he flips through the pages. Just a little. He tells himself he’s not going to read anything. He just wants to look.

He doesn’t find any writing, aside from a couple of grocery lists and misspelled names of a couple of movies written under the word “GOOGLE???” and double-underlined. What Dean mostly finds are pictures. Drawings, in ballpoint pen. They’re not especially good. But they are thoughtful. Careful. Every line in place, just so. There’s the mug on Castiel’s bedside table, his shoes discarded by the edge of the rug. There’s a fallen log from the woods out back, a couple of leaves with curled edges. There is Castiel’s left hand, awkwardly drawn with his right. And there’s a tin of muffins Dean baked last week, still cooling in their paper cups, the tops crusted like little mountain ranges. There is the rumpled blanket on their unmade bed. Castiel’s eyes have taken everything in with such tenderness, tried to do justice to their limited world. Tried to record it, put it down in ink. To capture its truth, maybe even to make it beautiful.

Dean closes the notebook and puts it back, right where he found it. He goes into the kitchen and finds Castiel washing the dishes, up to his elbows in soapy water, singing quietly to himself. Some song Dean doesn’t know.

Dean watches for a minute and then he walks up behind him and rests his chin on Castiel’s shoulder, feels him tense for a second and then relax completely, tilt his head to the side so that Dean can press his face into Castiel’s neck, can exhale there and inhale the smell of lemon soap and flannel and skin.

"Maybe you don’t feel it," Dean says. "But I do. Okay? I do." He shuts his eyes and leans his face on Castiel’s shoulder. A wet hand creeps backwards around his waist, holds him. "So trust me."

"Alright," Castiel says. He turns and kisses the side of Dean’s head, so softly, just above his cheek. "I will."

 

 

 

_Love one another but make not a bond of love:_  
 _Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls._  
-Khalil Gibran 


End file.
